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I only post this so that others take heed.I was hoping for a farmers Market crop of heirloom tomatoes.I have a greenhouse which I heat this time of year with still occasional frosts and a hoop house e where I put the larger plants and watch the temp closely. Yesterday was hot here so I opened the window and the door, and then went to bed early because I was tiredWOKE up to a bad frost.... OVER 200 tomato plants in there.Most of them froze...... I feel so dumb.....

I seem to recall that the length of time below 50 oF they can survive is like a wedge of cheese .. 50 oF it is the thick end of the wedge of cheese for several hours , at 40 o F your about the middle for three hours and the bottom thin end is about 37 o F for an hour or so .Below that instant death .

Do the leaves really droop limply or is there a spark of life in them ??

oh wow, I feel your pain! I wonder if you can cut the dead ones back to their first true leaves, kind of like when we hard prune our Peppers back, and see if they resprout. The roots could very well be ok. It would be like an experiment.

Well all is not lost. I have several brandy wines (which are the type I had intended to try to sell) that I have in very small pots for an event we are doing, I was planning on giving them away to attract people to the march against monsanto. .... and though they are very small at this point several pots had 2 and 3 seedlings.AND needed to be thinned anyways. (it is a good thing that tomatoes transplant so easily)

SOOOO looks like I will be able to replace the brandy wines with smaller ones, and the other exotic types, I ALWAYS grow wayyyy too many. So I am just hoping that at least a couple of each survived, to " carry on the lineage in Janets.... seed cupboard )I feel like I need one of these warnings every year..... that it is not yet warm enough to go to sleep without checking...

If it's any consolation, your story probably provided a very useful reminder to some of us that there's still danger afoot in those cold night temperatures. You certainly spurred me to take our nights more seriously for a while, and bring in my tomatoes!

If it's any consolation, your story probably provided a very useful reminder to some of us that there's still danger afoot in those cold night temperatures. You certainly spurred me to take our nights more seriously for a while, and bring in my tomatoes!

YES..... I feel like a need a reminder every year..... OH and one more consolation, I WAS running out of pots.... NOT anymore

Night time temps here in Kansas City have been in the 60's and 70's (F) the last couple nights so I've left my seedlings out overnight...thought I was safe until I heard thunder and had to get up in the middle of the night to cover everything...wind, lightning, hail since then.

@AtlantaMarie wrote:Before I planted my small babies, I checked the long-term forecast. Showed nothing lower than mid-40's. As of yesterday, Tuesday night is NOW supposed to be 34.

And just as a lot of seed-planted stuff is poking their heads up...

My husband is a peanut butter addict (there should be programs for a guy like him, LOL!) so I keep the wide mouth jars in the garage for situations just like what you're experiencing. They're large enough to cover all the the largest seedlings and I cover them with the jars and then plastic over the top for double insulation.

Do you have anything like that around to use? Also I've heard that covering with straw can be effective, I haven't tried it but I observed that the plants I had that were surrounded with rotting straw came through our hail storm night a few weeks ago. The hail was large and caused no real damage of the normal kind - it just melted and congealed into a sheet of ice around a lot of my plants.

It wasn't even close to freezing that night but the iced almost did me in - I never would have believed it possible!

LOL. Sounds like my hubby, Audrey.Jeanne! Oh, I'm sure we'll get something figured out... Had started keeping cut-off milk jugs, but they took up too much space and I got rid of them. PB jars are a good idea.

1. Because we live so rural, we order a lot of things online. Some comes with packaging in a blow up strip of plastic with sections about 5-6 inches by 8 inches. It's like a bubble wrap but only a single bubble wide and very large. it works as a great insulator. We keep the strips and lay them over seedlings then cover the whole row with another material so it's double insulated.

2. We bought a new sofa last year that came wrapped in the material that is used for row covers. If there is a quality furniture showroom near you, you might check into large sheets of bubble wrap, the white foam wrap and the fabric row cover material. Chances are you can pick them up for free as they simply throw them away.

3. We keep all bubble wrap and foam wrap that we receive and simply roll it up and stash it in our garage. All of it comes out for quick protection when an out of season frost is headed our way and it doesn't take up that much room.

1. Because we live so rural, we order a lot of things online. Some comes with packaging in a blow up strip of plastic with sections about 5-6 inches by 8 inches. It's like a bubble wrap but only a single bubble wide and very large. it works as a great insulator. We keep the strips and lay them over seedlings then cover the whole row with another material so it's double insulated.

2. We bought a new sofa last year that came wrapped in the material that is used for row covers. If there is a quality furniture showroom near you, you might check into large sheets of bubble wrap, the white foam wrap and the fabric row cover material. Chances are you can pick them up for free as they simply throw them away.

3. We keep all bubble wrap and foam wrap that we receive and simply roll it up and stash it in our garage. All of it comes out for quick protection when an out of season frost is headed our way and it doesn't take up that much room.

Audrey, I buy a ton of stuff from Amazon and I have always just put those plastic pillows in our recycling (deflated). I love your ingenious idea!

@GWN wrote:I only post this so that others take heed.I was hoping for a farmers Market crop of heirloom tomatoes.I have a greenhouse which I heat this time of year with still occasional frosts and a hoop house e where I put the larger plants and watch the temp closely. Yesterday was hot here so I opened the window and the door, and then went to bed early because I was tiredWOKE up to a bad frost.... OVER 200 tomato plants in there.Most of them froze...... I feel so dumb.....

My heart truly goes out to you GWN. Last season I had the brillient idea of putting my lettuce seedlings under a clear plastic hood... in very hot weather with direct sunlight. I had never grown lettuce before (much less anything else). I needn't tell you the outcome.

Supposed to get down to 24 tonight in KC...and cold for the next few nights. My solution is a little red-necky...large sheets of reinforced construction plastic (to seal buildings under construction during the winter). I salvaged them out of the dumpster after my employer built a new office.

I'm covering peas (up about 2"), beets (up about 1/2")...garlic and onions are under there as well. I have two new beds that haven't been planted yet...waiting on the freeze to pass.